HOLLYWOOD - Seventy-five years later, Sunset Boulevard remains as fresh and as incisive as the day it first appeared. A razor to Hollywood’s sanitized balloon. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece is not just film noir, it’s a horror movie in the purest sense — fame rotting into madness, celluloid dreams dying in the California sun.
As William Holden’s washed-up screenwriter Joe Gillis first appears in our sights, bobbing dead-eyed in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool, the film is revealed as a ghost story and a confession rolled into one. Framed by Gillis’s snarky, deadpan narration, we’re pulled into a crumbling mansion deep in the Hollywood hills where an ancient silent screen star, Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, is living with her monkey and her butler (a crisply committed Erich von Stroheim). “I am big,” she announces at one point. “It’s the pictures that got small.” It’s a classic line, one of the most famous in cinema history — because it’s both a delusion and a hard truth. As Norma says, the pictures have gotten small, the industry has changed and left her behind. Swanson plays her as a woman who’s lived inside her own echo chamber for so long that there’s no difference between what she’s saying and the way that she’s saying it. She’s lived out of time. In her own private castle.
The reason Sunset Boulevard still speaks to us now is because it doesn’t feel dated. If anything, Wilder’s screenplay crackles with contemporary relevance, a microscopic dissection of the dark, narcotic exchange between celebrity and desperation, adoration and the gaping void. Joe Gillis tells us throughout the film that he’s merely making use of Norma’s money. But it’s the city, it’s the industry that’s taken advantage of both of them, and a thousand like them before. In those graceful camera movements through her mansion, the film serves as voyeur, the camera and the audience watching the necrotic glamour of a tomb.
Swanson is operatic, all edge and grandeur and blood-pumping humanity. Her eyes have the depth of oceans but also glassy shallows, pools of vanity and vulnerability. Each gesture balances the scale between tragedy and cabaret. Holden, for his part, is the perfect foil — no-nonsense, his cynicism a suit of armour against the madness of everything around him. Between Swanson and Holden, Sunset Boulevard plays out the eternal duality of Hollywood archetypes: the ageing has-been clinging to what’s left and the fresh-faced opportunist taking advantage.
The artistry of the film still takes your breath away. John F. Seitz’s cinematography turns Los Angeles itself into a Gothic landscape of long shadows and tilted angles, palm trees made to look like tombstones. Franz Waxman’s score prowls around the edges of the film like an operatic wolf. The final scene — Norma, haunted and beautiful, descending the stairs in her tuxedo robe, whispering her lines to an unseen audience, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” — remains one of the most deeply unsettling images in American film.
It almost feels like a prescient text, this film, when you consider our current obsession with social media, with influencers, and with finding ways to be noticed in an algorithmically curated world. The themes of Sunset Boulevard — obsession and the hunger for reinvention, the traps of self-delusion — hit a little louder in a world of Instagram and TikTok than they do Paramount Studios. The medium changes, but the constant, the eternal, is the attention, and the pain of the withdrawal of attention.
Verdict: ★★★★★
A scathing, seductive masterpiece that still defines Hollywood’s dark side — a film that gazes into the abyss of stardom and finds us staring back.
Reviewed by Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
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